You're Not Going to Believe This, But Touré Embarrassed Himself

He shames himself with dumb.

After airing a package report from NBC News White House reporter Kristen Welker, Touré thanked her but noted she did not go far enough. “Santa Claus is black. He just is,” the MSNBC host mock-insisted.

“I, for one, am glad Santa is black because I don’t want my kids worshipping some white dude who flies in to give them stuff,” Touré continued. “Thinking a benevolent white man gives them stuff every year is good training for a life on welfare.”

He added that he is not surprised by the resistance to the notion that a powerful figure like Santa could be black.

“The insistence he’s not black and can’t be black strikes me as an attempt to perpetuate white supremacy and to posit that whiteness is somehow normal and central while blackness is other or different,” Touré continued. He insisted that “race is fictional” and, as a social construct, it bears little bearing on day-to-day life.

“You do know, there is already a generous, benevolent black man in your children’s lives who lives in a place that is magical, who has given something to each and every American, whether they have been naughty or nice,” the MSNBC host concluded. “You know who I’m talking about?”

Obama, he meant, which he made clear when he played a video of an Obama impersonator touting Obamacare.

Meanwhile, Megyn Kelly defended herself on the #SlatePitch nontroversy issue.

She had said "Santa is white" in a previous show, and of course all the people you'd expect to splutter in outrage spluttered in outrage.

She has a question for the racialist left, though.

Also in the news tonight, is Santa Claus real and what does he look like? Hide the kids, mom and dad. Spoiler alert. Apparently we ignited quite a controversy the other night in a segment about an essay that argues Santa should no longer be portrayed as a white man. The African-American author of the piece, Aisha Harris, was upset about the commercial depiction of Santa Claus as white and argued that a, quote, "Fat old white man who is, quote, melanin deficient, made her feel ashamed as a child." Thus necessitating an image makeover.

And kicking off the light-hearted segment I offered a tongue in cheek message for any kids watching saying that Santa, who I joked is a real person whose race is identifiable, is white just as Harris claimed in her piece but that we were debating whether that should somehow change.
...

KELLY: But that, too, has brought a lot of, you know, feelings out by a lot of our viewers saying, look, you know, historically, all those pieces I referenced, all those pieces Ms. Harris referenced showed a black Santa. And some people are taking issue with her suggestion that the mere color of his skin in these portrayals as white is somehow alienating to black children or, as she put it, causes shame in them.

[ZERLINA] MAXWELL: It is alienating to black children.

KELLY: Why is it skin alienating and why is that not racist?

This is the simple truth of it. What's going on here is simple: yes, black kids are kind of put off by a Santa Who Doesn't Look Like Them. It's only natural.

But if a white person says "Well I want Santa to be the way I always imagined him (and most painters, etc., have always depicted him), looking like me," that's racist.

Why? Why the difference? Why is it natural and understandable that Aisha Harris (writer of the original stupid Slate article) should be alienated by a white-skinned Santa and prefer a black one, and yet it's racist that whites might prefer it the other way around?

There seems to be an awful lot of words being wasted on this as people strain to not state the simple, obvious truth of it.

There also seems to be a strange notion at work in these arguments. Whites in the majority will tend to argue, or at least implicitly support the idea, that the majority should win in these arguments.

The left doesn't agree with this. Fair enough. But they seem to take an indefensible position: the majority should not win, ever. The majority should always be frustrated in its desires, simply because it is the majority, and the majority must lose.

I don't see the sense of that proposition at all. Just in terms of simple utilitarianism, it fails.

posted by Ace at 06:59 PM

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